Not Very Deep Thoughts Says Howdy!

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Stories should take you somewhere. Let you listen in to conversations. Sit in places you wouldn't normally sit, introduce you to characters you don't know. You've opened the door, so pull up a story, let it loose on that big screen in your head. Enjoy.

Here it is. The blankety-blank post on potty mouth. I’ve written several versions of this post, and they all cycled back to dialogue and character credibility.

I get hammered occasionally by beta readers and casual readers alike for having a 13-year-old coming out of anesthesia and asking her gramma if “thah muherfuher” is gone. She is angry at the doctors, for good reason. Her gran was a Rosie the Riveter and her big brother is a super jock. They swear in front of her all the time. Her mother and father try (like mine did) not to swear, at least in front of the kids. When mine stopped trying I was surprised that my mother had a better grasp of profanity without reaching for it than most stevedores or wisecracking pimps or East Coast gangsters. My father could say son of a bitch with a wider variety of inflections than Sherwin Williams has color swatches.

I recently read a 1978 Elmore Leonard. “The Switch”. Wherein a 14-year-old male wannabe tennis star says “bullshit,” among other things, to his confused mother who is trying to stick to the straight and narrow country club life and wants to swear back at him but can’t find it in herself to do it. I love her character, though. Waking up in the Stepford thing and not liking it, not knowing what to do.

Here it is, 2019, I was writing about the 70s. I was there. And people go “Oh my!” about a purported “good girl” swearing. Huh? I’m sure there are lots of people who have led sheltered lives or have a dense moral code of some kind or find an air of superiority that allows them to be easily offended by how “the other half” talk, but I have a news flash – No pimp or drug dealer or angry salesman or most any member of any gender in any number of vocations says “Oh, drat. I am certain Jesus will punish you in His own way for (insert dastardly deed here). I only regret I have but one (wallet, bank drawer or other cheek/valuable) to offer you.”

In good conscience I can say there might be characters somewhere who would say that. But having been around for (a very long time) I would say that person is few and far between. I read somewhere that the magic of Elmore Leonard’s realistic dialogue is all in knowing how and when to use “motherfucker”. I have had multi Grammy winning artists (artists, not pop stars) say to me in conversation “…but that motherfucker? That’s the shit.” Would they say that on stage in front of the President, on national television? Probably not. In conversation, shooting hoops with the Prez. More than likely.

Know this – I am not a fan of gratuitous profanity. Even an angry character can get over the top if you write too much “fuck you, you fuckin’ piece of fuckin’ shit motherfucker.” Even for Tony Soprano. Or when it just doesn’t work. I watched Gone Baby Gone a couple of months ago. Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are completely unconvincing when they try to get ghetto with the bad guys or even between themselves. You can tell “motherfucker” and all of its nuances are lost on Affleck when he tries to deliver it. In cases like that, not everybody needs to swear. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it’s too much or out of place/character punt it.

I recently posted something written after a character had been through an angry scene. That attitude spilled over into what I had written that came after the anger episode and I hadn’t shifted gears for the character. I posted it, read it and immediately hit edit. He was mad earlier, okay. He got over it, no need for him to sit on the beach with someone who hadn’t pissed him off going all fuck this and fuck that and here a fuck, there a fuck everywhere a fuck fuck. Right? Scene and characters require tone, and language imparts both character and tone. Stylistically, as a person who attempts to write, I don’t want to tell you who who my characters are, I want them to tell you. Sometimes they have to cuss, but not always.

Lets go back to the 13-year-old girl and “muherfuher”. She’s coming out of anesthesia. She’s uninhibited, angry, confused and heartbroken by doctors that she believes have ruined a certain part of her life. She has an ex Rosie the Riveter grandmother she adores and a 6’ 4” super jock older brother. Her ears aren’t virginal and that’s how she feels at the moment. There are other times when in her persona of class role model she starts to use “shit”, catches it on the way out and corrects herself. In one role she is the epitome of good girl. Off the clock as herself she just wants someone she can talk to, be with, be herself around. Show that person with some depth, with her closeted anger, without altering her vocabulary and it becomes my word as a writer against hers as a character. I don’t belong in there and she becomes what I say she is, not who she says she is. I stand by her usage because in that instance “muherfuher” works. She does not sit down to eat take out barbeque with her parents, as delivered by her should-be boyfriend, and say “One’a y’all motherfuckers wanna get yore thumb outta yore ass an pass the fuckin’ Tabasco?” Time and place. Knowing when and how to use motherfucker. Motherfuckers.

One of my top two favorite authors, Barbara Park, received criticism for her 5-year-old character’s grammar. One critical example – “Let your children read these `Junnie (sic) B.’ peices (sic) of work and then spend months unlearning the poor grammar it teaches.” Also – “Words fall short to describe this genre of writing — not only is the language abysmal, but as a parent of young, impressionable children, I find it rather detrimental to their psyche and behaviour (sic). For our children’s sake, do not endorse these books; rather boycott them entirely.”

Wow. Harsh. Junie B. Jones didn’t swear. She yelled sometimes, was impulsive, called things dumb and forgot her manners. And spoke her mind like who she was. Her character talked just like my 4-and-6-year-old grandkids. Park’s (paraphrased) response to her criticism was she wrote kid dialogue for kids, appropriate for the character. She wasn’t trying to teach grammar and the people who missed that argument weren’t worth the time. Mark Twain said the same thing a hundred or so years earlier. Steinbeck, Hemingway, Hammett and Leonard all say the same thing. Before she died Park had over 60 million books in print. And her Junie B. books, to me, are a graduate course in flash fiction. How to boil a story down to all it needs, and how a character can tell you who she is. Readers like it, screw the squares.

Now, a flash course in character from a master –

I was at a Santa Barbara writers’ conference a couple of weekends ago, and I listened to the students, reading. And they all use adverbs, ‘She sat up abruptly.’ And I tried to explain that those words belong to the author, the writer, and when you hear that word there’s just that little moment where you’re pulled out of the seat. Especially by that sound, that soft L-Y sound. Lee. So often it doesn’t fit with what’s goin’ on, y’know. I mean, if a person sits up in bed, they sit up in bed. You don’t have to tell how they sit up in bed. Especially with what’s goin’ on. In this instance, she sat up in bed ‘cause she hears a pickup truck rumbling by outside very slowly and she knows who it is. So you know how she sat up in bed. And in her mind she’s saying, ‘It’s that fuckin’ pickup truck’. She knows it is. And then there’s another, say, half a page or so of inside the character’s head and the phone rings. She gets out of bed and feels her way over and almost knocks a lamp down. And she passes this stack of self-help books, on the desk, and picks up the phone. And I suggested to the young woman who wrote this, ‘Save the fuckin’ pickup, drop the fuckin’ adverb, and put it with the self-help books and it’ll say a lot more about your character.’ See, it’s little things like that. The contrast works better. – Excerpt from Anthony May’s 1991 interview with Elmore Leonard. The whole thing is available here

The Graphic is not just sloganeering, it’s a mantra. As such it becomes the mascot graphic for Writerly Concerns. We would all do well in our writing efforts to “Emulate” the Drumulator.

Ooops! Make That N for “NO” Carolina

In 1961 a US Military plane carrying two nuclear bombs crashed over a farm in Faro, North Carolina. On the way down one of the bombs completed six of the seven steps needed to detonate. The bomb was 250 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

There’s a joke in there about Andy of Noberry, but we all know California looks just like North Carolina if you shoot below the palm tops. Or Wisconsin or Oklahoma or New Mexico…

The information on the bombs was released by the U.S. government! Imagine what they’re NOT telling us…That volcano? Well, you see, there was this –

Conspiracy journalists say part of the No Carolina bomb is still missing. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

VILLAGE PEOPLE UPSET
AT YMCA PLANS

headline Central Somerset Gazette (UK)

What was the problem? Going Coed? Allowing non-Christian heathens access? Threatening to leave the EU? Interrupting non-stop Cumberbatch streaming in the lobby? Firing the riding chaps only barista? I mean it must have been something major because these guys are the poster boys for diversity and can’t we all just get along.

Ain’t No Baby Ruth, Geniuses

HEALTH OFFICIALS: POOLS, DIARRHEA NOT GOOD MIX

Headline, Omaha (Nebraska) World Herald

I want to say “Well no shit duh…” but I won’t. I managed (was) the concession stand at a City Park run public olympic size pool complete with lo-hi dive one summer. Find me a better gig for a 19 year old male.

Trivia – Nebraska has the longest, straightest main street in the world. Sort of the way your intestine feels after a colonoscopy prep.

Art or Wallpaper

I am a fan of Noir. I do not consider myself any sort of expert. I like Pulp and Hard Boiled and Soft Boiled and Neo 20th Century Realism. Simple stories, human failings, all the Seven Deadlies and Femme Fatales. As you can tell by the gratuitous cheesecake I think the latter is probably the lifelong addiction. One only needs to be young and see Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford set the screen on fire, or Lizabeth Scott and the rest of the blonde bombshells go coy and bat their eyelashes or the wide eyed innocent yet sultry Loretta Young brunettes…I digress.

I watched The Stranger a few nights ago. Edward G.Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles. Hard to beat the cast. Directed by Welles. Unlike his other looming epics, this was a straight up nut case, sweaty faced maybe over acted bad guy and the guy after him flick. With Welles shot calling. With caveats. He had to come in on schedule and on budget (he hadn’t had a directorial gig for 4 years) or risk he and wife Rita Hayworth’s income potential going forward ending up in the producer’s pocket until it was even. A guy named Nims was assigned the editing tasks and he whacked 32 pages of script before they even got started. Sixteen pages from the front end, setting the stage.

“He was the great supercutter,” Welles said, “who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story. And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn’t advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me.”

Therein lies the creative vs. the commercial, the artist vs. the editor, style and substance vs. shelf space. Let’s be honest. Most people with a grasp of the language who want to write could crank out serial romance, commercial YA, Kiddie books. An English degree might help, a good eye for what sells and how to plug yourself into that. Cloning is a cinch. From the Hardy Boys to I’m not really Robert Parker, give me a salary, a style sheet, an antagonist/protagonist scenario and a computer. You want what? When? Thank you. But…

A good deal of what Welles wanted, although he retained a lot of control for what made it, got cut. On the cutting room floor or never shot at all. He wanted to dial it up into nightmare, the money guys wanted a movie, not a statement. Noir film critic and historian Bret Wood wrote –

“Character development suffers from the loss of these scenes.”

What? Show me the “editor” or “content consultant” today who would say that.

Scenes that set up a more intense tone of suspense. Nope. The Bishop’s Wife as thriller. Box office. Good guys, bad guys, formula. Top notch formula. One could put it in the pop literary category with Elmore Leonard. Sweaty, swift, BAM, done. Well executed, suited for screenplay, good guys and bad guys and some tension.

What about the emotions left floating in the air in Faulkner, the things Steinbeck and Twain drop on us we never even see that most editors today would say we didn’t need? Particularly things hinted at and left unsaid that drive the story deeper, make readers participate? Reading what could have been in The Stranger and what was left out and considering the subject matter (Nazi war criminal), I can understand how it pales to what might have been. Still, it fares much better than the hint of Gothic and similar nutcase of 1950’s The Second Woman, which looks like it came in on time and under budget as a derivative NorCal Rebecca.

Welles pulled it off. One day early and under budget. I figure being married to Rita Hayworth and her ass being on the line with his might have been motivational. But considering other projects he did that pissed the money people off, that he did his way, are now considered high film genre art and classics, there’s a nasty undercurrent standard at work in this film. And the The Stranger, although excellent for what it is, failed to make the Welles art lexicon. It did well at the box office. But…

Steinbeck called it Hooptedoodle. Did he write some? Yes, he did. By current standards Faulkner’s intro to The Great Gatsby seems almost endless, but it sets the tone. It could be stark and short and bip bop or we could have been dropped right in it, but then the pictures wouldn’t come off the page like peeling Andrew Wyeth watercolors on a hot, breezeless summer day. The pace, and the “excess” that paints the picture, sets the scene and the tone are vital. Unless there’s a deadline and a budget and an editorial mandate. This by page 6, this by page 10, where’s the sex and the motivation by twenty or you’re out, show don’t tell unless it’s critical to character development and tone then- why are we seeing this?

I was prompted to write this after a trip to the local Half Price Books. Where all the buyouts from publishers and Amazon and the Barnes and Noble across the street sit on shelves in shiny similarity. The same covers, the same fonts. Pick your genre, shelves of sameness. And then there’s the well worn, well loved classics and obscure gems commanding higher prices, getting all the traffic. If it looks like it’s been read, maybe more than once, it’s a treasure. If it’s another MacComber or Rowling clone…

Once again, if you missed it – “And since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn’t advance the story at all,”

Like this:

It was asked here by Anonymole (and all over everywhere) when to show and when to tell. I can’t answer that, directly, but I have a few ideas. First, and this is critical to making the show/tell judgment call, here is an excerpt from Charles Ardai’s Afterword for James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress. (The book discovered, edited and published by Ardai.) This is lifted out of context but hits the nail on the head.

“It’s the inherent contradiction in any work of fiction, the one we all conveniently ignore each time we sit down to enjoy a novel: Can we believe what this narrator is telling us? Well, no, of course not – it’s all lies, it’s all made up, that’s what fiction is. But within the fiction, you say, if we imagine ourselves inhabitants of the characters’ world instead of our own, can we believe what we’re being told then…?”

Credibility. With any audience, we need to judge when they will keep their suspension of disbelief going and hang with us, and when they will pull up and say, “Whoa, now. Really?” Here are a few thoughts about show vs. tell.

Ease up on the Minutia – An editor once told me that we don’t need to take every step of every day with the characters. We need to see them in their environment and show them in conversation and interaction with other characters when it matters. Telling is often scene setting, or setting up an important conversation or event. Janie brushed her teeth, threw on her clothes, picked up a drive-through coffee and made it to X in twenty minutes. We don’t need to stand there with her while the toothbrush timer runs down, button her blouse or select shoes (unless we’re showing some character) we need to get her and her hurried state of mind to the next show by getting the basics told.

Ass-U-Me – We might understand something physical or conceptual and ass-u-me the readers do as well. If a doohickey has a name, and only the fifteen people you work with know what it is, either tell what it is (if it’s mandatory to the story), show the doohickey by character interaction, (M in Bond) or drop it. The way Hans Solo used sci-fi slang to sell the speed of his ship in the original Star Wars always drove me nuts. But he glossed over it, the people at the table bought it, so we let it go and ass-u-me whatever the hell he said, it meant fast and he was some kind of hot dog space jockey to pull it off. Great generic transplantable bar scene, though, in spite of the gratuitous techno-babble.

Weather, battles, travel and digressions – If the weathermatters, or turns into an antagonist/protagonist, get into it if you must. Otherwise, conditions if they matter told. Think of the intros to Dragnet. Do we really need to know it was a hot and muggy/wet and cold day in Los Angeles when it never really mattered to the ensuing story?Battles and fightscenes are an either/or. Jim kicked Bob’s ass. Told. Extended blow by blow of Jim kicking Bob’s ass. Shown. Make the call. Do we need to see it, or is it enough to know it happened?
If ajourney matters, show it. If not, tell it. Think Huck Finn on the River. “Me and this black dude named Jim, we got up to all sorts of stuff. The End.” No way. How about the Bible? Woops, Jesus is 12. Man, that went by fast. And now he’s 30 something! But those are the story markers. Why waste time on The Messiah helping Joe build furniture and go to Messiah school? TV and all genres of fiction (okay, leave Eco out) do this all the time. Example – “Springtime was cold and muddy in Colorado, which made Texas look pretty good. By early summer a gambler in Galveston had taken his horse and saddle, newspapering didn’t appeal to him, so he thought he’d try doctoring for a spell.” Now we could watch “him” lose the horse and saddle in the poker game, that would be fun, or it needs to come out in a backstory/catch up convo with a bartender or a “saloon girl nurse” so we get the character’s side of it, not ours, but we don’t need to ride across Texas with him if it’s just a ride and campfire trip. And the audience has been primed to accept those things. Ever see or read about a cowboy getting off his horse for a potty break?Digressions, into characters’ minds or daydreams or god forbid lengthy postmodernism authors and their mindset and philosophy and opinions and preaching ad nauseum. Or endless architecture, seasonal weather, travelogue and set decorating ramblings. Moby Dick and whaling how-to. That is all us telling and we often need an outside opinion to point it out and defend it or let it go. In Cain’s book mentioned above his digressions into weather and architecture got cut as they did nothing for the story and weren’t in sync with his style. But – in another genre, another style? Judgment call.

Bottom line for show/tell is what happens to characters that we can dispense with and what do we need to show. Test – can you sell it without selling the story short.

Some authors can’t. Every gadget, every garden, the smell of leather and horse and…I prefer people to things, and if properly done we don’t need owners’ manuals for things in stories. Look how easily we accepted Warp Speed or salt shakers as stun guns or scanning wands in Star Trek. There are those who would invent a language for aliens. Roddenberry did not. Nor did he explain his dystopia. It was Bonanza in space. Dress the set, get to the people. Tell, show. This a classic chapter/scene set up since forever. Where are we, and…Action.

Which brings me to: why don’t a lot of (burgeoning) writers like dialog? Ask yourself that. Don’t like people? Aren’t comfortable talking? Can’t hear them in your head? Don’t know how the conversation should go? While you’re at it, ask yourself this: do you buy the leap you’re asking your readers to take by being so uninvolved with your characters? (telling). I faced this in Affable. I wanted Jackson out of the dump he’d landed in for several reasons. How? One line, two? Whatever, is it believable? “Oh my, Jackson is suddenly wearing a tux vest and ponytail playing in a piano bar off the strip and is also the houseboy for the I Felta Thi sorority of upscale hookers. Because they liked him.”

What? Why? How? In a movie it could have been some quick cut soft focus double exposure layers, girls at the dive, Jackson playing, laughing, girls hustling the talent guy, girls at the gas station, BAM. I didn’t have that luxury, nor did I buy it at two or four lines. A chance to reinforce Vegas without a travelogue, put up some strong, independent female characters (important for tone), lots of visual language, some foreshadowing. I could have gone over the top with damp carpet smells, told more scene setting, more sideline character development, bumped my word count, but why? Or simply told the whole thing. Divergence should have a purpose. Credibility and putting Jackson in a position for what’s next. For what’s next to be credible we needed to see it. I needed to see it. I couldn’t have told Savannah as vehicle and persona or Jackson’s improved caste half as well as showing it.

In the next chapter of THG3 I gloss over something that an erotic writer would have been all over for a couple of pages. So what’s important varies by genre. Regardless, credibility and stylistic consistencyare the show vs. tell litmus tests. I got that straight from the editor’s mouth.